'Freewheeling'

The Freewheelin' Art Neuro In Honkers

Way back when, in the olden days of the 1980s when they struck the deal to return Hong Kong to China, my friends and I got interested in the historic weird problem of Hong Kong. So we started to write a song about Hong Kong without really understanding it. It's weird because so much of the city rests on the historic injustice of the Opium Wars and if you've ever read the history books about that, you're left wondering about the naked aggression of capitalism and colonialism as practised in the 19th century. The song itself sort of went nowhere because for one thing it was hard to play live and for another thing Hong Kong seemed a world away form the suburbs of Sydney.

Years went by and I got to have a first hand look at Hong Kong in 1996. I was there on contract for 5 weeks at the end of which I was made job offer to go permanent, but because the handover was looming, they didn't want to give me the kind of juicy ex-pat deals. So I declined to stay on.

Though, the other thing that worried me was the presence of the PRC (read, mainland communist China) police officers and the utter gap in perception to do with what Hong Kong had become. The were there to reclaim the place as if all of its glory and wealth naturally belonged to China. It's not true - it was a sad little fishing village until the British came along. What Hong Kong had turned into was the magic fruit of capitalism and colonialism as practised since the 19th Century into the late 20th. Rightly or wrongly, the British who were 'leaving' could lay claim to Hong Kong as an achievement. None of it would have happened without the British. Which, of course was not a popular view in Hong Kong 1996.

Thus in 1996, I was meeting a lot of local people and telling them there was going to be a terrible upheaval and their way of life would lead to conflict with the expectations of their new PRC overlords. It might not happen that year or the next, but it will happen. The answer I got was, "as long as we're all making money, nothing will change. It will be business as usual."

And so it remained for many years after the handover. It was as if they really were Freewheeling down History.

As I watch the news today about the ongoing riots in Hong Kong, I have to say I'm feeling pretty vindicated. Leave things long enough, the reductio ad absurdum reveals itself; the contradictions inherent in the compromises will erupt as a force. The Hong Kong people of 1996 were way too optimistic about what it meant for Hong Kong to "go back to China". Frankly I thought it was deluded sentimentalism. You don't really get to go home in History. There's something historically necessary about the youth of Hong Kong rebelling against the prevailing rule of the PRC proxies.  I get it - it's real as it gets. It's like something straight out of the lyrics of 'Won't get Fooled Again' or 'Street Fighting Man'. It's no accident it's going on and maybe there are inevitable things in history.
Not that it helps them any for me to point this out.

As for the song itself, it harkens back to that moment in 1996 when amazing things seemed a lot more possible than they turned out to be.


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